Another all-nighter whose thinly real opening half sets up a dumfounding series of payoffs.
The Great Ambrose returns (Superstition, 1998) for another paranormal thriller that may lack the philosophical darkness of Philip K. Dick but has all of Dick’s endless identity inversions and reversals.
Reader Warning: This novel may be unreviewable without giving away plot points that the normal (or unprofessional) reader would not want to know. The title refers to Luis Buñuel’s strange and seductively surreal The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, about a group of fashionables who mill around a dining room, try to sit down to dinner, and never make it, though all Ambrose takes from that movie are Buñuel’s strangeness and surrealismo. James Bond can take a backseat to Charlie Monk, who has the fluidity and speed of a dreamBond. In fact, for a while, the reader wonders at the outrageous abilities of Monk—an agent for a governmental organization so secret that it doesn’t exist—as when he brings off supremely dangerous and difficult missions with dreamlike ease. As in Dick’s Blade Runner, we wonder as well if Monk’s childhood memories haven’t been implanted: he has such difficulty bringing some of them back to mind, especially the face of beloved fellow orphan Kathy. Even so, when off-mission for long periods, Charlie beds an endless stable of beauties (sometimes two at once), drives his Porsche, and paints landscapes that a strange little dealer buys by the vanload. The reader keeps thinking that this is really unreal. Deathproof Charlie, is he superhuman? Or just inhuman? We’re not saying. But the paranormal side of the story turns on Virtual Reality implants that restore perhaps fake memory, and these draw from experiments by Dr. Susan Flemyng, whose husband has been murdered in a superbly described decrepit Siberia. Midway through the story, Monk’s secret aspect is revealed, and there’s no turning back for Charlie or the reader.
Another all-nighter whose thinly real opening half sets up a dumfounding series of payoffs.Pub Date: March 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-52796-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of...
What if the only way to save humanity was to lose almost everyone?
This was kind of inevitable: Wendig (Vultures, 2019, etc.) wrestles with a magnum opus that grapples with culture, science, faith, and our collective anxiety while delivering an epic equal to Steven King’s The Stand (1978). While it’s not advertised as an entry in Wendig’s horrifying Future Proof universe that includes Zer0es (2015) and Invasive (2016), it’s the spiritual next step in the author’s deconstruction of not only our culture, but the awful things that we—humanity—are capable of delivering with our current technology and terrible will. The setup is vividly cinematic: After a comet passes near Earth, a sleeping sickness takes hold, causing victims to start wandering in the same direction, barring those who spontaneously, um, explode. Simultaneously, a government-built, wickedly terrifying AI called Black Swan tells its minders that a disgraced scientist named Benji Ray might be the key to solving the mystery illness. Wendig breaks out a huge cast that includes Benji’s boss, Sadie Emeka; a rock star who’s a nod to King’s Springsteen-esque Larry Underwood; a pair of sisters—one of whom is part of the “herd” of sleepwalkers and one who identifies as a “shepherd” tending to the sick; and Matthew Bird, who leads the faithful at God’s Light Church and who struggles with a world in which technology itself can become either God or the devil incarnate. Anyone who’s touched on Wendig’s oeuvre, let alone his lively social media presence, knows he’s a full-voiced political creature who’s less concerned with left and right than the chasm between right and wrong, and that impulse is fully on display here. Parsing the plot isn’t really critical—Wendig has stretched his considerable talents beyond the hyperkinetic horror that is his wheelhouse to deliver a story about survival that’s not just about you and me, but all of us, together.
Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of attention.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18210-5
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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